Cultivating Community Change

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Organizational Development

This fact may be obvious, but sometimes it needs to be said: your organization is more than your services and programs! Capacity-building activities like strategic planning, community engagement, and knowledge development can help you tap into new resources and networks, capitalize on unanticipated opportunities, and survive challenges and crises. Strong Roots has the expertise and experience to work with groups of any size and developmental stage, though we specialize in working with startups and growing organizations as well as partnerships and collaborations.

What type of group are you?

Startups and Grassroots

You’re small and lean, relying on caffeine and the passion of your core group to get your ideas off the ground. Flexibility and responsiveness is key: trying to build a structure or a plan at this stage of the game can be counterproductive. Instead of taking this traditional approach to development, Strong Roots works with your group to help you learn more about the cause you’re supporting, the community, potential resources and supporters. Through developmental evaluation we can assess your initial efforts and determine the best way to share those results to build support. Finally, as success starts coming your way, we can facilitate discussion around the all-important question – what next?

Growing and Going to Scale

Now that your initiative has shown some promise, opportunities abound – but should you pursue that grant, seek out more volunteers, launch a social media campaign, or try something else altogether? Now’s the time to take a good look at your mission and plan for where you want your organization to be in the future so that you can match your actions to suit. Developmental evaluation can be used to adapt programs from small pilots to multi-site sustainable initiatives. Community-based research plays a huge role at this stage: building your knowledge base and connecting with participants will help ensure that in the rush for success, you’re not leaving the community behind.

Partnerships + Collaborations

Those working for social good are increasingly recognizing that no one group or organization can work alone: that being said, forming a lasting partnership is no easy task! Strong Roots can help build understanding of the unifying issue by engaging stakeholders and compiling data from official sources. As the initiative evolves we’ll work with relevant stakeholders to develop and fine-tune the partnership stucture, and support expansion through the evaluation of spinoff programs and the partnership itself.